Ben Cardin: “let me speak on behalf of our children and our grandchildren. Mr. Levin pointed out our national debt, the actual debt…”

“let me speak on behalf of our children and our grandchildren. Mr. Levin pointed out our national debt, the actual debt now is $8.3 trillion, $28,000 per person in this country. What we have is a birth tax, and we are adding to that birth tax. This bill, as advertised, adds another $70 billion or $69 billion to the debt, but when you look at it, it is much higher because we are using gimmicks again. We remove the income ceiling on Roth IRAs, and we count that as a revenue gain of $6 billion when we know, in fact, it will lose revenue for the Treasury to the tune of $1.3 trillion a year. So we are using gimmicks and we are going deeper and deeper into debt. We are doing this for what? Why do we not have offsets? You look at the extension of dividend exclusion, the dividend exclusion does not end until 2008. Why do we not work out a program to pay for these extensions? We tell our students they have got to pay more for their college education, and that we are not going to provide the relief because we do not have the money. We tell our veterans we cannot provide the health care that we promised them because we do not have the money in the budget; but the tax cuts, that do not expire until 2008, we can put in this bill, knowing full well it is going to add to the deficit of the Nation. Where is fiscal responsibility? Why are we not looking after our children and grandchildren? Why are we adding more debt to what they are going to have to pay?…”